If I were to succinctly sum up what February was like in Iceland I’d have to go with: terrible weather. Yes, February was probably one of the most dreary months weather-wise that I can recall. If it wasn’t snowing it was raining, and if it somehow wasn’t precipitating then it was most assuredly still cloudy and windy. Oh the wind. But hey, at least we’re gaining sunlight back pretty quickly!

Of course dreary weather and Iceland go hand in hand and the wind is almost always a constant anyway. So what made February stand out in a bad way? Well, it was probably the fact that it was just so systemically bad. There were only a few brief breaks, but otherwise it was snow, snow, and more snow. Here’s a look out of our window, for reference:

Yep, white-out conditions. However, in retrospect even that wasn’t bad because at least you could (sort of) see through the window, on other days the windows just looked liked this:

Yessir, nothing like ice-covered windows to start your day! Those are the days where you just want to crawl right back in bed, but sadly the ability to do just that seems so rare anymore. Instead you need to get up for one reason or another and head out into the frigid world. For awhile even our welcome mat was entirely froze solid.

There’s some irony here someplace.

Though, as I mentioned last time, our walkways get pretty hammered with snow and ice so I guess a frozen welcome mat isn’t too surprising.

Beyond the threshold isn’t a whole lot better, just more snow and grey skies – and also the wind.

It’s more pretty when you get to look a photo of it, because then you don’t have to deal with the wind. 🙂

Yep, ole’ February didn’t offer much in the way of enjoyable weather. I mean I generally like snow, but it was just so grey that it got pretty old.

Fortunately Meem left behind a daylight lamp for us, which helps! Also, it’s not like we have to spend all our time outdoors. We find plenty of excuses to just chill inside – be they legitimate (such as a swarm of papers I’ll talk about in a minute) – or slightly less legitimate (but shhh) such as our participation in Bolludagur.

The cream puff went down nicely with some yummy oat milk – something we’ve become quite a fan of since moving here!

We put it in our coffee pretty much every day, at least when we can find it, the closest store sells out of the oat milk a lot.

Or maybe we just drink too much coffee. Nah. 😀

Though to be fair I did go heavy on the coffee front during February. Not really because of my thesis per se, but rather because of the “productive procrastination” I’ve done as a way of avoiding my thesis as much as possible. In fairness to me, as the title implies, the procrastination was indeed quite productive. Over the course of about 30 days I wrote five papers, which is to say I completed all the papers for all my classes in one month. If 30 days doesn’t sound too impressive, that timeline is also filled with gaps due to exams and some travel. So if you just look at the number of days that I actually worked on papers, you’re looking more at 5 papers in 14 days – and these aren’t short papers either, nor are they on topics I find especially interesting. It’s without a doubt the biggest “paper push” I’ve ever done academically, and while the per-day writing period for the thesis will surpass the paper-month of February, it won’t generate as many separate papers on disparate topics.

So yeah, for February you could accurately, if not disparagingly, quote that famous Christmas song, “Oh, the weather outside is frightful, But inside you have to write papers.” Yet, despite typing so much that my carpal tunnel flared up, the good news is that insofar as things go that I loathe, only 2 group projects and a bunch of random case assignments stand between me and exams. With any luck I’ll be done with one group assignment by the end of this week, leaving little left for me to use to productively procrastinate on my thesis. That’s a good thing, while I’m a “good” productive procrastinator, I’m not so good at truly procrastinating.

Anyways, whining about the weather and school aside, February did offer some good times! 😀

For starters, February marks both SB and Valentino’s birthdays! This year SB is 47 and Valentino is 5. To celebrate, Valentino even got a card from one of his plushie friends, which while not specifically about his birthday, was good timing for it!

If you’ve followed this blog for awhile, you’ll remember that for Valentino + SB’s birthdays it is a tradition for me and the other Boys to make them a cake. Tristen was my original co-baker, but now it’s extended to Pig and Pigsten as well (with a guest spot for Broli this time too!). We also make them dinner, which usually features salmon. As for the cake, a staple over the years has always been strawberries – which makes sense given their favored status for both SB and Valentino, but this year they were especially yummy as a nice “summer taste” against the crummy February weather!

So, with strawberry cake in mind, the Boys and I got to it.

We don’t have much space to work here, nor do we have many implements, but we make due with our cheap and/or “salvaged” kitchenware! Cooking with the Boys is always an adventure, for instance Pigsten and Broli had to be kept out of the batter, I mean literally kept out, as in their entire bodies.

While the cake was baking we got started on the frosting. Our local store doesn’t have a big baking section, but we’ve made due with limited baking supplies in the past, and as such have gotten good at using pudding or jello to make flavor combinations that aren’t available at the store, in this case strawberry!

We also decided that strawberry icing wasn’t quite enough in the way of strawberries, so we sliced up some real strawberries and decorated the cake with them! Both SB and Valentino were big fans, and it tasted yummy!

Valentino about to dive into his cake – if he looks less than thrilled that’s just his “concentrating” look he gets when it’s time to eat, Polar bears take their food very seriously.

Plus, the fun didn’t stop with salmon and cake, we got a surprise package from my Grandma as well. It contained one of the most glorious things on planet Earth: party mix.

My Grandma had actually shipped this package way back in December, it just took for-ever to get here. Heck we didn’t even know about it until MIL asked if we’d ever received the package from my Grandma. We were like “Uh, what?” Turns out it was on its way, it was just moving very, very slowly. However, when it finally arrived it was in good shape and the party mix was still nicely sealed and not stale, woo!

Whether you know it as a party mix, snack mix, Chex mix, some chow variant, or something entirely else, there is only one thing you really need to know. There is my Grandma’s version, and then there are failed imitations. Fight me brah.

In fairness most Grandma things are the best in the world, this just so happens to be party mix. I’ve had it from several other people, and I’ve even had it from people copying the Grandma Recipe™ – and the result is always the same, “not even close” – and don’t even get me started on the store-bought stuff. 😛

Anyways, this is all to say that we were very excited for a big bag of party mix! We somehow even managed to not eat it in one sitting. Heck I think the bag lasted over a week.

But that wasn’t the only package we received, MIL had sent SB a birthday present, but in the box with SB’s present she included some of the Annie’s Bunnies that we used to love so much!

For reference the bunnies are gone too. 🙂

So yes, I guess you could say that we did what most people do when the weather outside is nasty, we ate – a lot. Also, in case you were wondering, not all of it was snack food, we even made a few fancy things like smoked lamb open-face sandwiches.

Which paired exceptionally well with a couple of nice Scottish beers!

The near-beer on the right was just the warm-up beer.

I guess the message here is that while the outside world in Iceland in February wasn’t too enjoyable, that the inside world was still full of good times. Sure, writing five papers wasn’t really fun, but it was still productive, though I guess now I have less excuses to keep nudging my thesis back. We also had a bit of travel that was very exciting, if not even more difficult insofar as the outdoors are concerned, but that’s for next post!

In the meantime, I’ll end on a positive note, which is that I’m currently looking out the window at bright blue skies (and it’s not dark at 3pm anymore!). It’s still quite cold, but blue skies are blue skies. 🙂

Welcome to Dinosaur Bear’s version of a February check-in. Nothing too exciting to discuss this time around, but I won’t let that stop me from filling up some more space on the interwebs.

I suppose the biggest piece of news is that after months of preparatory work to accomplish oh-so-very-little on the administrative side of things (see “meh“) I’ve finally put pen to paper on the ole’ thesis. I mean that metaphorically of course, pens are extinct. That pen on your desk doesn’t actually exist, it’s just a replica pen used to fool us into thinking wild pens didn’t go extinct in the late 90s.

To be even more precise, I haven’t even really started writing the body of the thesis, but I have begun working on the structure of it. This means lots of revisions with supervisors, and of course one supervisor telling you to do something that the other supervisor specifically tells you not to do (hint: go with whoever is actually giving you a grade). So that’s gonna be fun. Now, regarding the thesis, it’s big. The thesis itself is over an entire semester’s worth of credit load, which isn’t surprising considering how much larger it will be than my undergraduate thesis. I think the page total will be somewhere around 120 pages at 12-pont font and 1.5 spacing (alas double-spacing isn’t a thing here) on A4 paper. While not a tome by any means, it’s certainly the largest, most complicated thing I’ll have ever written and hopefully, Baby Jasus willing, will ever write (at least unless I want to). It will also be my first piece of any real size to be published! Yep, it will be peer reviewed and published including a print version! So that’s kind of cool. But also not cool, because more eyes means more expectations. Where are those 1000-2000 word undergrad papers with zero citation checking when you need them!? (In a landfill, that’s where – or to be optimistic, recycled into something more useful, like toilet paper)

Anyways, why I’m slightly more stressed about it than might be normal isn’t because of the length or depth required. It’s the timeline. Without getting into specifics (see here) I’m going to be attempting to do the thesis with only 42% of the time as the program (really vaguely) intended. This is hugely problematic for a variety of reasons – the largest of which is that I’ll be taking 60 credits. Yes you read that correctly S-I-X-T-Y credits at once. I have also have a part-time job on top of that, which granted is a small number of flexible hours but it’s still a thing.

So that’s what I’m concerned about, the time-frame. I’ve started an aggressive strategy towards my other classes which involves writing papers months in advance and that’s gotten really draining really fast. But hey, I have a pretty good track-record of spewing out A/A+ papers (of usual graduate school length) in one day – though it makes for a really shitty day, unless you own stock in coffee and/or energy drink companies.

Now, with all that said, here is my goal: not to turn Dinosaur Bear into a massive thesis QQ-fest. I’ve found that there is this really odd culture of incessantly crying about your thesis at all levels, be it Bachelor, Master, Doctorate, or Post-Doc. Heck, you can find entire websites devoted to wallowing in thesis misery. On one hand I get it, but on the other hand, even if we assume that this post-doc thesis will be 4x as bad as my undergraduate thesis (no real basis for that, 4x just sounds fun) it still won’t be as bad as cutting up scrap metal with a blow torch in the middle of a parking lot in high-humidity, August, 90s heat. While cutting up scrap metal had its fun factor, a Midwestern heatwave/humidity bomb in August generated one of those “Yep, I don’t like this” moments in my life that I haven’t forgotten. Therefore, I probably won’t talk much about my thesis, sort of like I haven’t really spoken a whole lot about my program in general, at least in comparison to earlier academic endeavors. Yes, I’m going to mention it from time to time, but I’ll leave the thesis to the thesis and Dinosaur Bear to Dinosaur bear. This post is more of a historical “checkpoint” as to when I roughly started the thesis and which also serves as a rudimentary overview of what the thesis will entail.

So on that note, let’s talk about something more exciting!

One thing that I don’t think I mentioned on the blog between the new year festivities and Meem’s visit was Pigsten’s birthday! Yes, little ole’ Pigsten (who was “born” in New Mexico) turned 2. We celebrated with a plate of some of his favorite foods and all of his “window” friends came down to enjoy it with us.

We also let him have an entire rum-filled chocolate to himself, which he thoroughly enjoyed.

If you were curious where the chocolate came from, it was from a giant (110 piece) variety box that SB got from her work for Christmas.

This is the bottom layer, there was an identical layer above that one that we had to work through first.

That sucker lasted us for awhile, heck even Meem got to sample some of them.

Now, this is probably a good point to introduce Pigsten’s new friend, Broli!

Broli is a hatchling Brachiosaurus who came to live with us in December as part of a gift-package from one of the Boys’ friends in the United States! As Broli is super-tiny, Pigsten acts as his chauffeur to the world – plus I think Pigsten likes to have someone even smaller than him around! In fact Pigsten and Broli spend a lot of their time keeping an eye on Pigsten’s construction site, which continues to progress at variable speeds.

While it’s certainly come a long way from the big dirt pit that greeted us when we moved here, it’s not changed quite as much as you might think. The latest change involves the addition of a third, larger, crane in the pit nearest to us (there are two).

They’ve also started to do some foundational work.

The crew has definitely increased in size over the past couple of weeks, and while they still aren’t moving what I’d call “fast” the pace has definitely increased.

They also seem to have busted out multiple shifts, as it’s not uncommon for them to be there from ~7am to ~8pm on weekdays, with smaller shifts on weekends.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ll probably do a dedicated construction site post sometime closer to when we leave. It’s been a pretty big part of our existence here, from the hours of entertainment in the first bit when we had no internet, to enjoying our neighbors QQ hardcore about the jack-hammering, to karma catching up with us and the site shining multiple 7 trillion candlewatt lights into our apartment 24/7 (to the point we had to buy more curtains), to just trying to guess what is going to happen next. It’s also interesting to watch them work in some of the really crappy weather, or, as Lucretious put it:

“Pleasant it is, when over a great sea the winds trouble the waters, to gaze from shore upon another’s great tribulation: not because any man’s troubles are a delectable joy, but because to perceive from what ills you are free yourself is pleasant.”

Speaking of weather, it’s been really weird lately. We are in this cycle of “really cold and snow” and “less cold and rain,” and each comes with a dabble or two of gale force winds. I’d say we’ve been leaning towards the snow side of things lately.. as made evident by this photo from earlier in the week showing some whiteout conditions.

But what happens is that the snow falls, then it gets compacted due to foot traffic, then we get just barely above freezing, then it freezes and more snow falls. The result is a several-inch thick layer of ice over everything. I remember this happening in the Midwest, but never to this extent.

On the flip side, as least the snow is pretty before it turns to ice.

I took this photo while walking home one night, it’s a good shoot of what our neighborhood looks like.

Now, to segue from one snow topic to the next, I recently realized something that might seem really basic to you – but it took me months to fully understand.

As mentioned, we get a lot of snow and rain – really more snow and/or rain than sun. But in my near-daily outings, I noticed that there are some areas that simply never have snow or ice on them. Here’s a good example.

Now, that’s from a period without much snow, but you can clearly see what I am talking about on the sidewalk. The thing is, there are areas like that all over the place (though not as many as a pedestrian would like). At first I thought that people were simply clearing them, though as the weeks wore on I came to notice that the areas didn’t bear any signs of being cleared. Further, if they were being cleared, these people were clearing them at like 3am – every single day. So from there I just presumed that they were treated with some chemical, but then I remember that unlike the U.S. where we’d happily dump nuclear waste on the snow if we could, Iceland isn’t so keen on chemicals (heck they don’t even really use salt – which as “green” as that may be, generates some real pain in the ass walking routes). Plus, the way the clearings appeared didn’t really look like any sort of chemical had been applied. I’ve seen how melting chemicals look (as Boston LOVED their salt and chemicals DEAR GOD – R.I.P. Entryway Floor), and these areas bore zero signs of any application.

Then, one fine day, it finally hit me. Geothermal heating. Yep, you may have thought of that first thing, but for some reason I did not. It’s actually really obvious. The buildings have geothermal infrastructure running to them already, so you just build off that and you can “heat” entire areas. This explained why the area immediately around the university was almost always perfect, but less than one block away you needed ice skates to get anywhere.

Here’s a really good example of it in action.

You can clearly see where the pipes are running. It’s really awesome, and kind of embarrassing that it took me so long to figure it out, especially when our own building has it in a few areas – though notably not in the interior (yet exposed) hallways for some reason.

However, I grew up in an area with zero geothermal utilization, so using the flames of hell itself to remove snow are not something I generally think of. So there’s a cool “The More You Know!” moment for you. In Iceland the devastating friction of two entire continents grinding against one another as the magma core of the Earth bubbles to the surface in the drift between them is harnessed so you don’t slip and die on the stairs. Science!

Sadly one cannot always utilize geothermal heat, so one tends to hide inside the geothermal-warmed building on the nasty days. The plus side to all that inside time is that Pigsten and I have really nailed our oat-pancake recipe.

Seen here with some delicious rhubarb (“Rabarber”) jam.

It also leaves plenty of time to sample the nectar of the hops – beer.

Speaking of beer, I’ve really been branching out lately. One of the many awesome things Meem did while here was buy me a lot of beer. Sadly I don’t get much beer here (aside from near-beers) due to cost, which makes Taco sad. However, Meem bought me quite a few, then SB picked me up a few the week after Meem left, so I’m decently well stoked on brewskies right now. I’ve implemented a “ration” system where I space out my “real” beers with “near-beer” mixed in to make the good stuff last longer. Such is the life of poor folk in one of the world’s most expensive countries. 😀

However, one key element of the ration system is “reward” beers. The most recent reward beer was from completing my second group project in two weeks. If you’ve read this blog for awhile, you’ll know that f*cking loathe collegiate group projects and can soapbox for thousands of words about how I don’t feel like they replicate real life (job) group work in my experience, at all. I also dislike the fact that this program even requires them – and I’m only half done with them for this semester, but enough about that. I completed the one last week and rewarded myself with this funky beer.

I mostly bought it because I thought the bottle was cool, but it was an intriguing fruit beer with lots of fruit flavors I wasn’t expecting. It was also vibrant red, probably the reddest beer I’ve ever seen. Once I completed it I added it to the “beer stand” which is a little area where I keep beer bottles and cans before recycling them (excluding near-beers, they go straight into the recycling bag as they aren’t nearly as cool).

As you can see here, I’ve put a good dent in the supply January brought in, but I still have more than seen here to go (including one physically-massive special beer to be addressed in the future!).

But yes, that’s about all I have to share for now. Nothing too exciting, but just enough that I felt like writing a post about it. Now I’ve got to get back to editing a (non-thesis) paper I am working on. I think I might enjoy a few of my chocolate-covered-salt-licorice bites that I picked up from Bónus the other day.

If you think chocolate covered “black” licorice sounds weird, then you should probably read this post because you have no idea just how weird it actually is. However, despite some initial reservations, I think I’m actually starting to enjoy the ammonium-filled “lakkrís” that Iceland is so obsessed with.

There’s probably going to be a few week gap until the next post, but it should be an exciting one when it comes! 🙂

Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens~Gimli (J.R.R. Tolkien)0000000000

Greetings and welcome to Dinosaur Bear!

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As promised I’ve decided to write a post about the more mundane and slightly less exciting aspects of living in “The Land of Fire and Ice.” The goal of this post isn’t to give an in-depth look at Icelandic culture or lifestyle. Heck, it’s not even really to provide a day-in-and-day-out account of being a ferner’ here. There are plenty of travel blogs that can do such a thing far more adeptly than I can. Instead I’m just going to ramble about a few things that we’ve been doing and encountered since moving here 3 months ago. Like anything in life there is some good, some bad, and some downright weird. Unlike a lot of my posts which have at least a semblance of a narrative, this time I’m just going to type things as I think of them (which is itself a result of which pictures I chose). So not everything here is chronological, nor does one thing necessary flow conceptually to the other. However I’ll try to keep my rambling structured to some extent! 🙂

So what happened once we got settled? Well, a lot. Not the least of which I found out that I passed the bar, and we also went on our first in-country trip. However, a lot of “easier to miss” things also happened. We had to do things like find out where a grocery store was, and once there, figure out what milk was. You’d think that would be easy but we ended up with an entire jug of yogurt (true story). We also found out really quickly that just because you recognize a brand, does not mean that that brand is going to be what you expect it to be. Case in point, a lot of the cereal is way different.0000000000

Mmm, delicious rugs with fras.

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Sure we’d both lived abroad before, but that time around we were part of a program (especially SB) so there was a bit of hand-holding involved. This was a full-fledged plop down into a country of which you don’t even know how to say “Hello.” The result is that things have been interesting (in both good and bad ways). For instance I once opened what I thought was a stall in the restroom to find a mini-kids bathroom all self-contained inside of the stall.0000000000

So when I say that we often don’t know what is going to be behind the next door, I mean that literally. As in, we can’t even read anything but the most basic of signs. I once also went into what I thought was a computer lab, only to realize I’d stumbled into the 9th circle of hell and it was a lab full of Macs. I still have PTSD.

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However, the good news is that SB is actually learning a bit of Icelandic. Partially because of her job at a preschool and partially because she is taking a basic Icelandic course through the university. I, however, am making less strides as my work doesn’t expose me to Icelandic, nor am I taking a class in it. I’m getting some of it just from constant exposure, but I wouldn’t really say that I’m actively learning it, as it’s more of a passive absorption. The last remnants of my German help some, but sometimes they cause more problems than they solve because it’s FAR from a 1:1 linguistic comparison.

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Still, all the confusion from the language aside, life is fairly normal. At least as normal as life can be when you live right across the street from an airport and a construction site.

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The construction site actually doesn’t bother us. In fact I’m probably going to make a post just about the construction site at some point in the future. However, in the meantime don’t be surprised if it sneaks into posts semi-frequently. It is a fairly big part of our existence after all. We’ve named all the workers and the machines and created an entire story, it helps deal with the jackhammers starting at 7:55 am.

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Of course “life as normal” also means that we can’t just enjoy living in Iceland and being students. Lots of a boring life stuff still has to happen. For instance, shortly after moving here my computer just shut off one night. Just, boom, dead. This is the same computer that I’d just paid $600 between shipping and customs for – a 4 year old computer no less (I later found out that the computer wasn’t supposed to have customs paid on it, but of course they didn’t tell me that). Anyways, I’m decent with computers and I knew enough to know this wasn’t something minor. So the tinkering began.

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After a few hours of poking, prodding, and dismantling I came to the conclusion that it was either the power supply (PSU) or the graphics card (GPU). Naturally, being in Iceland meant that regardless of which one it was, I was going to pay about 50-80% more than I would have if the same part had broken before I moved. That said, the GPU would be much easier to replace than the PSU because my particular computer uses a server-rack style PSU, whereas the GPU is just a standard make.

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So the first thing to come out for testing was the PSU.

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And from there we next went to the GPU for testing.0000000000

The good news is that it ended up being the GPU that had bit the dust. This was the first time ever I’d had a GPU die on me – wonderful. So I went about figuring out how to get a new one, and despite my best efforts I ultimately decided that I’d just need to buy one in a brick-and-mortar store here to get the best price (due to customs + shipping). However, I soon found that there were no stores within walking distance that carried computer hardware. Fortunately, I was able to use the free shuttle to Smáralind (mall) which leaves from City Hall to get within about 10 minutes walking distance of a computer hardware store. I guess the one lucky thing was that it happened before the shuttle stopped running for the season. So, thanks to a bit of leeching from the mall shuttle I was able to acquire a new GPU.

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Of course I paid over $100 more for it than I would have even in the more expensive stores in the U.S., but in my life when it comes to my desktop there are two options 1) I have my Desktop 2) I end up on the FBI’s (or I guess Lögregla’s these days) most wanted list.

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Installing the GPU was a bit of a chore since I have what is called a “small form factor” (SFF) case. But I managed without breaking anything.0000000000

Now, life being life, that wasn’t the only expensive thing that broke. As I mentioned before our camera lens also decided to break at some point. We had purchased the additional coverage when we bought it, but because we are abroad it turned into a massive shit-show to get them to honor the warranty. The end result is that we had to pay $50 to get someone to say “Yep, it’s broke.” Then pay $30 to send it to the warranty people so they could say “Yep, it’s broke.”

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Happy Icelandic boxes for sad broken camera lenses and other goodies.

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All for them to not replace it anyways. In the end we managed to recover about 1/2 of what we paid for the lens, which does us little good here since the same lens costs literally 2.5x as much in Iceland. We also are down a suitcase, because one of them got damaged too – oh and they didn’t replace that either.

Back to the living situation. Which is to say, back to the construction yard.

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And early morning (and late night) jack-hammering. Or as better reference of what morning currently looks like:

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That is about 8:30am, for reference.

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Also, and by late night I do mean late-night.0000000000

Ok so that photo was actually at like 6 o’clock, but more about the ENCROACHING DARKNASS in a bit. Besides, Pigsten might get angry at me if I discuss his “secret” construction site too much just yet.

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So living, yeah, it’s living! The boys are still as crazy as ever.

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Actually Valentino is a little more crazy than usual. We think it’s the newfound proximity to the Arctic Circle that is causing him to go a bit feral. Polar Bears can be dangerous yo’.

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We also live in a giant concrete bunker. No seriously, a lot of the buildings here look like they were built to withstand being shelled. While Iceland hasn’t been subjected to much in the way of shelling (outside of Red Storm Rising, anyways) it gets absolutely shitter-blasted by the more natural elements. As such, a lot of the buildings look like ass but when your existence consists of 365 days of wind blowing things into you sideways, I guess you sort of need solid construction.

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Our building also has grass growing on the roof. No seriously.

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It’s actually fairly common here, it’s also a good idea. In our case there’s so much grass that they even have to come mow it.

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It looks much nicer when it’s mowed.

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Naturally a lot the clipped grass ended up pilled up in the walk ways, or bunched up on our welcome mat. That was a kind of a pain. The street cleaner did come clean up everything in the street though, which was neat (except for Clifford, he hates street cleaners for some reason that we have never understood).

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Speaking of plants, Iceland doesn’t have much in the way of trees. I mean, I guess this isn’t a huge surprise. The environment itself isn’t conducive to tall vegetation (see wind), but a lot of the forests that were here got chopped down by the Vikings a long time ago. So most of the vegetation you see scattered around was intentionally (re)planted, and even then there isn’t a ton of variety in the trees. The cool thing is that while evergreens are definitely popular, a fair chunk of the trees are actually seasonal – which means you still get fall colors (even if nothing like New England). For example, here’s a photo from a bit ago showing some trees on campus just starting to change.0000000000

All those leaves are completely gone now, and have been for awhile – which is a bit more depressing. However, the change was fairly gradual in the leaves, so we had a few good weeks of colors!0000000000

We also had a crazy explosion of mushrooms around us! There for a week or two mushrooms were everywhere!

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I’m pretty sure Pig has since ate them all.

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In other plant news, we acquired three buddies to liven up our apartment!

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Yep! SB found someone who was getting ready to move and couldn’t take their plants, so we got them! They are three aloe plants, and their names are from left to right: Þorunn, Gunter, and Logi – none of which are pronounced the way you probably think they are. 🙂

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They live on the little table where our router is, right next to our big balcony windows. We won’t be able to take plants with us (which is why we didn’t even consider bringing any of our current buddies) so we were mixed on whether to get any here, but I’m glad SB got them! So much happier with plant friends. They seem to be doing well, as they are just babies. Their biggest threat in the beginning was a certain porcine predator.0000000000

Yes, Poor Pig, he wanted to eat them so bad. But he got scalded and then had a big ole’ piggy pout.

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However he’s since came to understand that Þorunn, Gunter, and Logi are friends, and not for eating. We feed him lots of oat biscuits from Bónus (our regular grocery store, featuring a pig mascot!) to keep him happy too, which probably helps.

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The Boys also like the rainbows. Like I mentioned before, rainbows are pretty constant thing here – and even manage to crop up on otherwise icky days.

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Sometimes you get lucky and can see almost the full arc, complete with Icelandic leprechauns (i.e. gnomes) at the end.

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I guess rainbows are a good segue into the weather in general, which is itself tied to the rising tides of darkness. A good bit ago we woke one morning to a little bit of snow on Esja in the distance.

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That was pretty much the beginning of the dark times. Since then we’ve been losing daylight, and fast. As an example, take this photo from around 9:00am from October 11th.

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A decent amount of light, right?

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Welp it’s still dark now. Heck, when I get up at 6:20 – 6:40 the northern lights are still out, and at 8:00am if feels more like 3am than 8:00am. I mean, seriously, it’s pitch black – and when you manage to pull yourself out of bed you know you’ve got hours more of darkness ahead of you. That’s only going to keep getting worse for the next 1.5 months. SB and I are not especially excited about that. In fact the darkness has really been the only thing that’s been hard about living here. Second to that is probably the fact that online shopping basically doesn’t exist, lol.

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The Fall has also brought some crazy wind. Yes it’s raining, but that’s normal. It rains so much you just sort of forget it’s raining. It’s also usually windy, but this had been some hardcore wind.

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SB and I have lived in windy places since 2010, each progressively more windy than the last. Here the wind is so bad that literally all the lines (power, etc.) have to be underground. Plus, I’ve walked through some Nor Easters, and those definitely, definitely sucked – however, there was a wind storm here a few weeks ago where I legitimately thought I could have glided if I jumped in the air. It was picking outdoor furniture up and moving it – for real, and I don’t mean plastic lawn chairs, I mean furniture. We couldn’t open our windows or balcony door – as in, we physically couldn’t open them due to the wind pressure. It was bonkers. Yet the planes still came into the domestic airport. Sure they were (literally) landing sideways, but one thing I’ve noticed about the Icelandic and Greenlandic pilots that we get to watch at the airport is that they give no shits. This isn’t the international airport down in Keflavík (you don’t actually fly into Reykjavík from most places – we didn’t either). We live near the domestic airport, which is obviously domestic, but also handles a lot of Greenland flights.

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Those arctic pilots don’t care. “Oh lookee there 500mph winds, nuclear fallout, a Russian invasion, Y3K, herpes, and a vortex to hell – no worries we’ll just land upside down, sideways, while simultaneously on fire and frozen.”

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One night it was bad, yet here comes the ole’ 1947 prop plane from Greenland, just flying in there sideways like a boss because peeps gotta have their noms. I like watching them. Heck, I think if the one of the volcanoes erupt again these guys will just fly into it, because that’s a shortcut to Australia.

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But alas, not all of us were born with the stock of arctic pilots. So instead we hide inside with our tasty coffee.

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Yes it should come as no surprise that SB and I purchased a French Press within the first 10 hours of being in Iceland. 🙂

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We’ve also found a brand of oat milk from Sweden called Oatly which is super delicious with both hot and coldbrew coffee!

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In other food news, we’ve been eating a lot of lamb. Whereas chicken had traditionally been our staple, chicken is INSANELY expensive here (~$23 for a pack o’ tendies), it’s now become lamb and fish, because lamb is decently cheap and fish is well.. still expensive, but comparatively less so. We’ve also been eating a lot of eggs, because eggs are cheap despite chicken flesh being expensive.

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In fact the expense of food has limited us quite a bit. For example, we no longer really go “out” on our Friday Date Nights. It can legitimately be $25 per person, with no drinks, to eat – and that’s just a hamburger place. If you add in beers, then god have mercy on your soul. Really you should plan to spend $30-40 per person at your average place. For instance SB and I went out once, got 2 beers and an appetizer and it was like $36 during Happy Hour. Yeap.

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So, in order to make up for our inability to go “out” we now go to the store and get something special for dinner. This something is normally boxed pizza, because it’s cheap and decently good. We’ve, of course, also continued our tradition of getting a Friday night treat as well! The treat is much more variable, though one thing we’ve found that is super yummy are these mini-cinnamon rolls.

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There is also a local chocolate company with the awesome name of Omnom Chocolate Factory that we’ve had a few times, but like most things their candy is really pricey. We actually want to go do the factory tour, but even that is really expensive.

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Still, we don’t let finances stop us from exploring culinary stuff entirely, and besides we’ve found a few cheap things to try out. A good example is lakkrís (licorice). Icelanders seem to love their lakkrís, it exists as everything – to the point that even lakkrís ice-cream seems normal. However, there is one thing you have to be careful about with their lakkrís. Some of it contains ammonium chloride (sound familiar?) – for realsies. For example, take Opal – a super popular traditional Icelandic lakkrís.

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If you get the red box, you can prepare yourself for lakkrís pellets that taste like cough drops. Not too bad, but nothing you’d be clamoring to consume either. HOWEVER, should you get the green box…

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…well then, let’s just say that some stones are best left unturned.

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The good news is that some of the lakkrís is absolutely delicious.

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That package is quite good. I mean, it’s licorice (read: not Twizzlers or Red Vines) so if you don’t like licorice-licorice you won’t like it, but I happen to be a fan of licorice (just not, you know, licorice laced with Borax).

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Of course if licorice isn’t your thing, they also have lots of non-lakkrís candies, as shown by Pigsten.

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And, if I’m going to mention food and candy, then I have to mention beer.

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If there is one thing I have to say about beer in Iceland it’s this: prepare thyself for poverty. Alcohol in general is more expensive here than anyplace else I’ve ever been (with the exception of Kaktovik). If you are eating out (and not in a happy hour), don’t be surprised if you pay $14 for a beer, and if you want to head to the store for a six-pack, prepare to spend about $25 for the six-pack, and that’s just for normal beer, not the fancy stuff.0000000000

Which brings me to my next point, the state regulates the sale of booze, so you have to go to state-owned liquor stores to buy real alcohol. These stores are called Vínbúðin, and there are about 48 of them in the entire country. Outside of those stores, you’ll be forced to go out (and pay $14 for a beer) or go to the store and buy “near-beer.” Near beers are those.. uh.. near beers, which range from 0.0% to around 2.5% ABV. These “beers” also range in quality from “I’d rather be in a gulag” to “Pretty decent.” One of them holds the title of being the worst beer I’ve ever had in my life, but I’ll talk about that in another post.

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Point being, a lot of what I get is these “near-beers,” and that’s for two reasons. First, price. You can get a big can of near-beer for as low as 99 cents. Second, availability. I can walk 2 minutes and get a near-beer. Getting to the closest Vínbúðin requires significantly more effort. Plus they randomly drive their cars on the sidewalks here while parking (no really). That said, a Taco cannot survive on near-beer alone, so occasional trips to Vínbúðin are a must.

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They have a pretty good stock of local, European, and Murkan’ beers at the locations we’ve been too. Of course they are expensive, but beer is life. As far as quality goes, Icelandic beers have been good. Anymore I don’t think any one country has beer on lock-down. I think it’s more brewer-to-brewer since the micro-boom. I’ve had a couple that were really good, and then I’ve had some that were meh. Just like any other place. The moral of the story is that there is plenty of good beer here, I just can’t afford most of it. 🙂

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But for those I do purchase, I even have a special little shelf – that’s how important they are to me.

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In reality I have to keep them in there because our refrigerator is the size of a shoebox. But hey, that doesn’t stop us from telling stories on it with magnets!

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Indeed, our apartment has a lot of quirks. From the Scandinavian-style shower that really isn’t a shower in the traditional sense, to the cabinets designed for giants, to water pressure that will rip your skin off, to the tiny little sink that gives you a bath (NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO) due to said water pressure. Yes, when coupled with the fact that we pulled most of our furniture out of the basement or trash area, it’s been an interesting time.

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I think the most interesting thing has been our bed. That’s a story that deserves to be told.

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Before we arrived we had decided that for both practical and cost-related reasons that we were going to forgo a bonafide bed and that we were going to try to get futon/pad/thing instead. This ended up being more difficult than we anticipated, because there are certain things that Iceland just doesn’t have (like folders, I’m legitimately serious, they don’t have normal folders here). It also got expensive, really quick, and after a bunch of frustration and two trips to IKEA we managed to cabbage together a bed unlike any bed I’ve ever had before.

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Yes, you are seeing that correctly.

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Our bed is a cheap futon pad, which has literally been cut into two pieces with scissors. Then, we mashed a bunch of plastic into wads and shoved that between the pads. Then we stuck a mattress pad on top of that, and then put a sheet on that and called it a bed. Yep. We also have one single comforter-type thing, no sheets. It’s most definitely janky, but it works.

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You may be wondering why the plastic? Well, that’s because the mattress pad alone wasn’t enough padding, and then the futon pad wasn’t big enough, so the mattress pad hung way over the edges. So you’d roll off the bed. So in order to fix that we could either spend $100 more for another pad, or get creative. I might be going for a post-doc, but a completely helpless academic I am not. I took some plastic out of the trash, rolled and taped dat’ shit up, and boom, bedtime. It’s been working for 3 months now, don’t hate.

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Now, the bed itself is decently comfy (one must have realistic expectations when sleeping on plastic and destroyed furniture). However, the sleep I get here is consistently the worst of any apartment SB and I have ever had. This is due to a couple of things. First, we have no fan. I’ve been sleeping with a fan for about 12 years now. A standard box-fan will run you $75+ dollars here (and you have to find it in the first place, fans aren’t really growing on trees in feckin’ Iceland). SB does have a rain app on her phone that helps some, but it’s not the same.

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The second reason, and the WAY more enraging one, is that we are surrounded by undergrads (in fact there is a party going on while I write this). Honestly I don’t feel like I need give any further explanation. To make matters worse, Iceland follows the Europe drinking culture of “Drink at home until 11:30pm then go out.” That sounds good on its surface, right? You’d think that it meant that the loud parties stopped around that time. The truth is not really. Generally at least one group will “stay in” which is all it takes for things to stay loud. Then, around 3am – 4am (or later) you get everyone rolling back in and seemingly playing an entire f*cking game of soccer in their apartment while wearing plate-mail armor and hitting the walls with sledgehammers. It’s insane. Like I explained, this building is basically solid concrete and steel. I can jump up and down on the floor and barely make any noise – yet these people scream and bang so loudly that it sounds like they are in your apartment at 4 o’clock in the morning – and this just isn’t on party days, this EVERY DAMN DAY. In fact, sometimes they are so loud you can hear them over SB’s phone rain AND the ear plugs you are wearing. Yes, I have to wear earplugs to sleep – almost every damn night. It appears to be giving me a nearly constant ear ache in my right ear too. It is TOTALLY AWESOME.

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To be fair to the building as a whole (but not really, they’re all loud), it seems like we got totally screwed with the luck of the draw. Of our entire building, the two loudest apartments are on each side of us – and that’s not just because we’re between them. You can literally walk to the other side of the building and it’s still those two apartments you hear. Then I’m convinced the people above us set off TNT charges randomly at 2am, that or ICBMs are randomly hitting the roof of the building. I have no idea what the flying f*ck they are doing, but they’ve legitimately got to have a bulldozer up there or something.

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But hey, at least the people below us don’t make much noise [Edit: nope, the day I posted this they apparently decided to open a blasting zone in their apartment at 2am – this is why I can’t say nice things on my blog]. But hey T-Rex that lives in their window also turned out to be a light!

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So yeah. Knowing what I know now I can safely say I’d never, ever have chosen these apartments if I’d not been a moron and realized that they would include undergrads. Harvard quarantined the undergrads into their own little hives of misery, Háskóli Íslands does not.

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But I suppose that’s as good as spot as any to shift the discussion to school itself, you know, the whole “fake” reason we came here in the first place. I say fake because SB and I were pretty transparent that moving here had little to do with school, that was more of a residence permit checkbox than anything else. Yet, despite it’s secondary status, it is the thing that eats up most of our existence. So what’s that bit of our life like? Well, I can’t speak for SB, but I can share some of my experiences in my post-doc program.

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First, a little about the school itself.

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Yes, I’m reusing this photo.

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We go to Háskóli Íslands (The University of Iceland).

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Háskóli Íslands is the largest (and objectively best, because I go there) of the seven schools in Iceland. To best honest I didn’t even realize there were seven, I only ever really hear about four: Háskóli Íslands, Háskólinn á Akureyri, Háskólinn á Bifröst, and Háskólinn í Reykjavík (which is Háskóli Íslands’ rival). Háskóli Íslands (henceforth HI) has something like 13,200 students. It’s by far the largest university in Iceland, but still fairly small by Murkan’ standards where schools like Ohio State have 743,000 students.

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At HI, I unsurprisingly attend the law school, which is technically called the “Faculty of Law” and is located with the “School of Social Sciences.” I have no idea how big the law school itself is, but it’s not big.

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I take a mix of classes (all law), and I’ve noticed a few interesting things. First, grading is on a 0 – 10 scale and they use the European Credit System (ECTS). I don’t understand it. You take like 1 zillion credits, and 1 credit hour doesn’t seem to actually equal 1 hour. For example I have a class that is, by itself, 10 credits – yet I don’t spend no freaking 10 hours a week in that class (not that I’d show up if I was supposed to anyways). Second, written law exams are not as common – they are instead oral and much shorter. Third, despite the lack of written exams, papers are way more popular. Fourth, cold-calling barely exists at all – and if you cold-call an Icelander or one of the European students they seem to die inside. The one exception to this is that I have one professor who does cold call, and perhaps unsurprisingly, he is an HLS graduate (we are cockroaches, I tell you – though it is kinda fun to watch people who’ve never experienced a cold call before fall like dominoes). Fifth, people are way more passive compared to what I am used to. Whereas a simple question could generate deathly blood-feuds at HLS, here it’s more like “Oh you think we should eat babies? Ok.” –> goes back to browsing Facebook. Sixth, hand-raising isn’t a thing. It’s just who can shout the loudest. Seventh – having a better grasp of English than your professors pays HUGE dividends when it comes time to communicate. Sure they can speak 27 languages whereas I speak one, but oh yeah I speak that one better. AMERICA FERK’ YEAR’.

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Blow it out your ass and send them to the God they wish they knew.

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So far things are going well academically. I’ve gotten “First Class” grades in the two classes I’ve got grades for so far (the schedule is weird, I have two classes which are already done) – though to be honest I’m not entirely sure what that translates to, other than that First is better than Second. I’ll probably discuss school more in the future once I’ve finished up the first semester and know more about my timeline. Overall it’s a bit of a mixed bag, it’s not what I thought it would be, with more of a lean towards the negative than the positive, but it’s not bad by any means. I think I’ll be more engaged once I can start focusing on my own research, which will hopefully be sooner rather than later. I mean, doing my own research is the main reason I did this program in the first place. Sitting in a class with people who don’t even have a Masters yet (FILTHY FECKIN’ PLEBS) is not.

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If it wasn’t obvious from my rant about living with undergrads, we live near the school. In truth our commute is pretty freaking awesome. I can be in class in 6 minutes. It’s amazing. Our neighborhood is Vesturbær which is kind of divided by Route 49 (Nesbraut – which at 4 lanes is the largest in the entire country). One one side is HI, construction, houses, 1 tiny overpriced store, and the airport. On the other is all sorts of cool stuff. I’ll let you guess which side we live on. Fortunately it’s pretty easy to cross over to cool-side land.

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It’s a pretty neighborhood when the weather is right.

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Plus, like I’ve mentioned before, Tjörnin is right in the middl(ish) of it.

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And with Tjörnin comes duckies, geese, swans, and 9 octrillion seagulls (who are assholes, but still friends).

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It’s a very pretty place, and while our walk-commute to the store is fairly long (especially on the way back with all the groceries), it’s nice that part of the walk takes us through such a pretty area.

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But mostly I just like all the duckies. 🙂

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This area (a bit further from us) also has stuff like the Icelandic parliament, Alþingi – I discussed that part of town a bit more here.

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So that’s kind of a general overview of where we live – in a noisy undergrad-dominated complex, near a construction site, an airport, the university, and across the country’s largest highway from some duckies. I don’t make it sound too great, but really it’s not that bad, we both know I like to whine. Most of the stuff doesn’t bother me, it’s really just undergrads – who, for reference, I still hated while I was one.

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In general, life here is just that, life. SB and I do most of the same things as before, some less-so due to cost, but our general schedule is the same. It’s cold, rainy, and windy – but we do get rainbows! Some stuff is impossible to find (ibuprofen, for example) but there are new things to find, which keeps things exciting – especially when you can’t even read the box. 🙂

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But then there are other things that you wouldn’t expect to find, but do – like pumpkins!

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Yes, despite not traditionally celebrating Halloween, the holiday has started to creep into Icelandic culture (as it should, Halloween = best holiday). We might have ended up getting a pumpkin, but that’s a story for next time. 😉

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All in all, this time in the “Land of Fire and Ice” is definitely a crazy adventure we’ve set out on, but it’s nothing we can’t handle. Right now both SB and I are in agreement that the encroaching darkness is the most difficult part about it. We’ve stocked up on Omega 3 + Vitamin D supplements, but at a certain point oppressive blackness is just flat-out depressing (side note: Icelanders consume more antidepressants per capita than any other country in the world). So if you were wondering why I started this post off with that relatively “dark” quote from the Lord of the Rings, it’s because 1) Quoting Tolkien is always relevant (fight me), and 2) the continuous darkness has been the biggest challenge we’ve faced on this adventure so far – but we won’t give up!

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I am many things, and stubborn as holy living shit is one of them. 🙂

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So that’s about that. I rambled a lot, and this post sort of covers a bit of the more mundane and random info I’ve thought about while writing other posts. It also does a good job of setting the current scene, which is full of looming deadlines, fading sunlight, and declining temperatures. Oh yes, winter is coming – we only need to look to the horizon.

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Actually it ended up showing right after I wrote this, but hey, I have a 180 degree view of mountains. So at least I can take in a pristine view while I eat laundry detergent candies, rotten fish, drink my $75 beer, and slowly go insane from endless darkness!

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ICELAND FERK’ YEAR’ – HEALTHCARE FOR ALL, CHECKMATE AMERIFATS

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But really, it’s not too shabby here. Life’s too short to be afraid of the dark.

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Until next time,
-Taco

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[Author’s Note: The formatting got super screwed up on this post for some reason. Because I’m at my wit’s end with such blogging issues, I used a very “lazy” way of fixing it. So if you are observant and tend to read between the lines, know that it’s not you, it’s me. 🙂 ]

Breakin’ rocks in the hot sun I fought the law and the law won I needed money ’cause I had none I fought the law and the law won.~Sonny Curtis, 1958

I fought the law.

Perhaps a more accurate statement would be that the law and I engaged in standardized testing combat. I like the more generalized sound of fighting the law better, and anyone who has taken the modern bar exam is probably prone to agree that it’s certainly a fight by most definitions of the word.

Yes, the time to discuss the bar exam has come. If this post is like any of the other posts in which I discuss some big exam then it’s probably going to get tons of traffic. Sorry visitors, if you’re looking for some in-depth statistical analysis, or a spirit voyage of metaphorical mountains and life paths, this post ain’t it. Instead I’m just going to talk about the bar exam is, what it isn’t, and what my experience taking the damn thing was like. Mostly because I’ll probably have forgotten all of this crap in no time.

For starters, about me, I am not a shining example of the law student turned bar examinee. Go read through a lot of this blog under the “Law School” category and you’ll find that while I bitch and moan like the best of lil’ bitches, I’m pretty damn lackadaisical about the whole affair. That’s not to say I was always apathetic. Way back in the before times I took the LSAT and I went zerk’ over that shiny POS. Walked away with a 99.9th percentile score and said “Yep, screw that.” Then proceeded to be the most median of median law students to ever grace the hallowed halls of our pompous legal education system.

I’m more about the doing, not the circle-jerking in class and the dumb-ass exams. So I spent most of my time in law school doing and I accumulated a metric shitload of pro bono and client-facing hours, which was awesome and I enjoyed doing. However, the lack of my burning Crusade-tier enthusiasm for the RIGOROUS classroom environment extended to the bar exam when it came time to take that shit. In fact, I was so uninformed about the bar exam that I legitimately couldn’t have told you how they graded the damn thing. Seriously, raw scores, scaled scores? No idea what the hell that shit meant. I took Statistics and got an A+ in it… 6 years ago and have long since purged that information in favor of more important stuff like knowing when the best Steam sales are. To be ENTIRELY honest, I didn’t even know what score I needed to get to pass in my jurisdiction until like one week before the exam. It was that bad.

However, don’t think this is building up to some “I’m so gawd dayum awesome I didn’t even study for the bar because I’m just that kewl and I got a perfect score.” Ah.. no. In truth this apathy meant that I didn’t study as much as I should have, didn’t study as well as I should have, and ended up wasting a lot more time than I should have. In fairness to myself, I had a lot going on at the same time, but anyone can hide behind excuses. The fact of the matter is that I did studya lot, for me – but I basically threw the prep syllabus out the window on day one, ain’t no one gonna do 12 hours worth of shit a day, screw that. Well, lots of people do, but not Taco, he has some Witcher 3 to play since he delayed getting it for two damn years. This was, of course, all well and good until the dark specter of the bar exam got close enough that I could smell its ballsack (the bar exam has savage swamp ass). Once I realized that I’d somehow pissed away like 2 months of time working on unimportant things like preparing to move across the world (you know, totes meaningless stuff) and that the bar exam was only like 14 days away and was prepared to ravage my asshole.

That’s when I entered the “freak-the-fuck-out” stage, which I promptly answered by proceeding to not really change anything and to just ramp up the self-pity and emo darkness. But it sucked. I was scratching my hair out and shit.

I’d have avoided that massive bit of unpleasantness if I’d more proactively scheduled my time. So I’m not about to drop some massive-ass treatise on what to do for the bar exam, but I’ll say that – seriously – make a schedule that works for you. Don’t rely on someone else’s schedule. This isn’t like law school where you steal someone’s outline and pretend you made it because you added one case, make your own damn schedule, save your hair follicles.

This is all to say that going into the bar exam I was feeling a very odd mixture of “LOL DON’T CARE” and “I wonder which countries I can flee to to avoid my crushing student debt.” Maybe everyone feels that way, I dunno, but if so then I’ve been talking to the wrong people. On that note, when it came to talking to people about the bar exam I found myself more in the camp of “SHUT THE FUCK UP” and less on the whole “Let’s discuss estoppel by deed *fap* *fap* *fap*” side. This is why I have no friends and will die cold and alone.

But, it don’t matter how much you beg and plead, time keeps trudging along and before you know it it’s time to take the bar exam. While your exact venue will probably range from “shit” to “shit” you may soon find yourself standing before some massive room in a convention center or other suitable complex of misery, woe, and extremely unpleasant temperature extremes.

Inside you’ll see a variety of setups, but chances are it will consist of somewhere between 50 (Alaska) and 845,192,271 (New York) tables or desks.

My center was on the smaller side, but you get the general gist of it. It is among these wobbly tables and extension-cords-plugged-into-more-extension cords that you will take the bar exam.

But what is the bar exam? No, this isn’t some philosophical question that we shall debate long into the wee hours of the morn’ – it’s obviously a damn test. But like, what does it consist of, other than THE LAW.

Well. Not much. But it’s all about dat’ presentation. So here’s a plain English breakdown.

The bar exam varies depending on jurisdiction. Some states are what are called “Uniform Bar Exam” or S.H.I.T. states. For the purposes of this blog post, we’re going to be talking about the UBE because that’s what I took. If you want to read about a non-UBE state then just search for “Mr. Hands” on Google and I’m sure you’ll find something.

The UBE consists of three portions, spread over two days. There is also a third day in some states that focuses on satisfying some state-specific component of bar admittance, I had such a state.

It’s the first three portions that I’m going to discuss.

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The first portion is what’s called the “Multistate Essay Exam” or MEE, because it’s uh.. given in more than one state. The MEE consists of a bunch of essays which COMPLETELY AND TOTALLY replicate real life, wherein you’ll face a legal issue and be unable to consult anything but memory to answer the question. Because that’s how the world works, no one gets to reference anything, ever. Thus the MEE is a completely realistic and accurate method of testing your ability to be a lawyer. Essay questions cover topics such as “Conflict of Laws,” “Torts,” “Masturbation,” “Wills,” “Real Property,” “Thermodynamics,” “Contracts,” “Evidence,” “G.I. Joes,” “Constitutional Law,” “1980s Horror Movies,” “Trusts and Estates,” “Why are there 8 hot dogs and only 6 buns,” and “Memomics,” just to name a few. Indeed, the MEE requires a vast array of knowledge.

While specific states vary, in my jurisdiction we had 6 essays we needed to answer. You are given a set amount of time to answer all 6 six essays, and time isn’t called for each essay. Therefore you must manage your time to answer all 6 essays. This can require a bit of triage since you might feel really confident about the “Sex Doll Laws in Soviet Russia” question, but you’ll miss it if you spend too much time on that pesky “Restraints on Alienation” question that came before it. Different jurisdictions grade the essays on different scales, but their all flawed and subjective as hell. For instance I don’t think my grader appreciated all the penises I drew in the margins, and those were some damn fine penises. Regardless of the specific grading scale the jurisdiction uses the MEE counts as 30% of your overall bar exam grade.

The second portion is what’s called the “Multistate Performance Test,” and seriously, what kind of shitty-ass name is that? So like, what? The bar exam is such a shit proxy for actual performance that you have to make a portion of test called the PERFORMANCE test? What the flying fuck. So is the rest of the test just unrealistic, incomparable, improbable bullshit? Oh wait, yes it is. This portion, the MPT for short, is also written as opposed to being multiple choice. However, rather than being presented with some fact pattern and then writing a little essay about it as you do in the MEE, in the MPT you do get some bigger fact pattern and then write a memo or brief or something about it. The MPT is also “closed” in that you are given a bunch of files and stuff that you have to read through, and you needn’t rely on anything outside those files to prepare the memorandum. The MPT consists of two such problems, so it’s like 700 pages long. Since the MPT is “closed” there isn’t a whole lot you can do to prepare for it like you can with the MEE, where a purchase money mortgage question is a purchase money mortgage question. You’re supposed to do like 4 thousand practice MPTs, but no, just don’t. Oddly enough I actually enjoyed the MPT portion of the exam because it was the only portion that seemed to even moderately have a real life purpose, yes I should probably kill myself. The MPT tends to be scored the same was as the MEE on a per-jurisdiction basis and counts for 20% of your final bar exam grade.

The third is what’s fittingly called the “Multistate Bar Exam” or MBE – such an original name. If you haven’t realized by now, the people who make the bar exam have no souls and therefore they just were kinda like “Ya know what, fuck it, let’s just call this the bar exam, bar exam – because we can’t think of some cooler name like ‘Multiple Choice Questions to Render that JD Useless.'” The MBE consists of 75,000 multiple choice questions and lasts for 600 hours – or at least that’s what it feels like. Also like 5 minutes into the MBE someone will finish and you will at first ponder killing yourself, and then them, and then everyone. Each MBE question consists of a bunch of answers all of which might be right, some of which are just more right than others, because where’s the fun in having you know, actual answers. The MBE tests basically every topic under the sun, so I hope you’re well versed in Ancient Babylonian Sheep Herding Techniques, because that is definitely gonna be on the MBE. Also you should probably expect some stupid topic your prep materials told you totally only shows up once every 20 years, because you’ll get 80 damn questions in a row about it and proceed to piss your pants right there in the bar exam as a silent but disgusting protest against the man. The MBE, despite being standardized bologna, is worth an astounding 50 freaking percent of the entire bar exam. So you can do really well on “babby-fills-in-the-bubbles” and utter shit on the MPT, and still pass. Makes a fuck load of sense that does.

Then there is that variable state portion I talked about, which covers topics/subject areas more specific to that jurisdiction. For instance in Vermont there is an entire day about Ben & Jerry’s Law and the Legality of Shooting Leaf Peepers. I’m not going to talk about that day because it’s just too varied. Just know some random stuff like when your state was founded and then proceed to write 15,000 words about why your state is the best state and you will undoubtedly fail probably pass.

Easy as pie – if the pie is poisoned, on fire, and rigged with explosives.

Of course the testing experience is just as much fun as the test itself! You probably have to travel, stay at an overpriced hotel, and then be at the exam center at 2:30am. On the way in you also need to donate a kidney to the bar examiners, but at least they let you pick which one (I’m pretty sure they eat them). Once in line and one organ lighter, you get to go through a variable level of security depending on your jurisdiction. Some places (*cough* Virginia *cough*) make you wear BUSINESS DRESS to this shit, because it’s not bad enough as is. But if you’re like most people and not taking the exam in such a fucking shithole fine example of statehood you’ll probably notice a couple of people wearing pajamas and then the rest will be decked out in paraphernalia for whatever law school they graduated from because vanity knows no bounds. I wore my finest. Which is to say I wore the only outfit I have. Seriously I wear the same jeans and shirt for a month at a time, ask SB.

You then stand in line from 2:35am until about 1:00pm and eventually you’ll make your way to a desk where some proctor whose soul died in World War I will make sure you’re not trying to smuggle some unholy contraband such as a GOD FORSAKEN PENCIL into the exam. There will inevitably be someone who didn’t follow the proper rules on Ziploc bag size and will be shot on site – be sure to step over the pooling blood and cranial fluid, it is oddly sticky. In my case there were uniformed police offers there too, because it’s not like there is anything better they could be doing with their time. Eventually after being stripped naked, anal probed, tazed, shaved, and given a burlap sack you’ll be able to enter the exam room which will either be -100 degrees or 200 degrees, either or. You may even be offered coffee, but that’s just to make you suffer more since you’re stuck in that room and can’t use the bathroom because this is the BAR EXAM and FUCK YOUR BIOLOGICAL NEEDS.

You then get to sit at your desk where you’ll spend the next 400 years. It will either be awkward silence as you don’t want to talk to anyone around you, or someone will try to talk to you and you’ll want to stab them in the face with the pen the armed SWAT team outside stole from you. You’ll sit waiting on everyone else to get signed into the exam room for anywhere from 30 minutes to 60 years. Eventually things will get started and the bar examiners will say a bunch of shit you don’t even care about. You didn’t come here today to listen to some 80 year old lawyer talk about the good ole days, you came to pretend you learned something in law school in order to give whatever institution you came from a brief boost of relevance in a dying world. THEN, after what you THOUGHT were the instructions, they will proceed to start reading you the actual instructions which will take another 5-6 hours and will cover such rigorous topics as “make your marks heavy and dark and don’t chew out your neighbor’s eyes.” However, just when you have figured out how to strangle yourself with that power cord from 1970 that has been strung across the floor with duct-tape, the exam will finally begin.

You’ll then feel a rush of adrenaline followed by alternating feelings of “FUCK YES I AM A LAWYER GOD” to “What if there was a grate at the end of the pipe and Andy Dufresne couldn’t get out?” Those latter thoughts are dangerous because they might cause you to ponder the philosophic question of why you are yourself covered in shit. Eventually time will be called and you’ll have answered somewhere between 0 and 1000 essays. However, since you started late due to the geriatric proctors you’ll have all of like 15 damn minutes to eat lunch. You’ll then be let loose into whatever convention-center type place you are taking the exam in and will see lots of happy smiling people.

Your fellow examinees will be happily chattering about the exam questions, which they know they aren’t supposed to do but they do anyways because they “cleverly” frame them in abstract and obtuse ways. Feel free to kill them if your character and fitness process is already over. If it’s not, just fuck them up real good but don’t kill them. Once you’ve inhaled your meager nutrition you’ll get to go stand in line again. Then you go inside and hear the instructions again. Then you repeat this for the rest of your life until you die.

That is legitimately the bar exam. It’s NOT some super magical awesome right-of-passage “muh fraternity” bullshit. It’s a test that doesn’t really test your abilities in a realistic manner. It’s just some artificial barrier to admission that costs a shit ton of money to take and is tacked onto an already problem-ridden legal education system. I’m not saying it’s easy, it’s not. Pass rates aren’t going to shit for no reason. But it’s NOT some metaphysical religious experience that tries your heart and soul on your passage to be the SWORD OF JUSTICE. Nah, it’s just a stupid test. If someone tries to argue otherwise, Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A is the answer.

Once the bar exam is over they inform you that it will take sometime between 2 and 4000 months to get your grade back to you, and that they’ll post a pass-list on the internet so that all your friends and family can easily check to see if you failed. Then, sometime after all that, you’ll have to go be sworn in. Depending on your state this will range from really easy, to gawd damn stupidly difficult – because magic words and mythical traditions are important and necessary after all.

In the meantime don’t worry about checking the online portal though, within 3 seconds of the names going live you’ll see all your law school acquaintances that passed posting “Annoying-bitch-of-a-Friend’s Name, Esq.” as their Facebook status. This way people know that they passed the bar exam and are definitely not insecure and dead on the inside and get by only through momentary flashes of pixels which equate to social validation on the internet.

If you’re fortunate like me you’ll have family and friends who leave you the fuck alone and let you tell them if you passed or not. But if you’re unfortunate they’ll be up your ass like wildfire, especially if they are too stupid to realize it’s all be plastered across the entire damn internet already thanks to the board of bar examiners. There is literally a “LOL UR KID DIDN’T PASS” website, thanks family.

However, you might also be fortunate like me and pass. If you did, I offer my sincere congratulations. Since states have different minimum passing scores, “passing” is different depending on the person. I did well enough that I surpassed the minimum score for every single state, that was cool. However, had I passed my jurisdiction by even 1 point, I’d still be happy. Truth is I don’t intend to bop around taking a bunch of bar exams, because holy shit I’d rather be reborn as a 8 year old one on of those ships that sank in the Children’s Crusade. The passing all jurisdictions bit just enlarges my wee-wee and is otherwise worthless.

If you did not pass, then I’m not going to offer my condolences, I’m going to congratulate you for putting up with that shit in the first place. Whether you decide to retake this dumb-ass exam, or move on with your life, I wish you the best either way. For those of you who stumble across this post while waiting on scores, for what it’s worth I thought I was going to fail for the entire waiting period. However, I was going to write the same post regardless. So please don’t feel like this facetious bit of word vomit is just because I passed, it’s not. It’s because this whole affair is stupid as shit and is part of an education system which is even more idiotic. I don’t think it’s really worth a super intensive post without incredulous overtones. So, if you failed, congrats on making it to the other side, even if it isn’t with the result you wanted. You gave it a shot, and that’s worth a fuck-load more than the person who doesn’t have any idea what you went through trying to give you some pep talk about failure (or even better, the lawyer who took the bar in 1947 and totally understands where you are coming from because nothing has changed in 70 damn years, nope). Fuck that. Congrats on what you did accomplish. Now either get back in the saddle or move on to something else, life’s too short to worry about some 200 year old proctor (who is probably a vampire, come to think of it) lecturing you about your damn cough-drops being in wrappers.

Regardless of pass or fail, the final answer is always the same:

Beer.

And that, dear friends, is all I have to say about the bar exam. My apologies if this post wasn’t what you were expecting, but I kind of like the way it turned out. If you need me I’ll soon be doing whatever it is lawyers do.

This is the first substantive post for quite some time here on ole’ Dinosaur Bear, and despite my current residence in Reykjavík I’m actually going to be talking about Albuquerque, New Mexico. See, in order to get to Iceland I need to share a few other stories. The first of which was when Meem, Valentino, and I went on an adventure to Albuquerque – henceforth ABQ because who wants to spell that name over and over.

This story takes us back to July, when I needed to go out to ABQ to take the dreaded bar exam. However, this post is not about the bar exam. So if you weren’t looking forward to that, then you can rest easy (conversely if you’re a neurotic fellow examinee looking for commiseration, come back later when I will devote an entire post to the bar exam). No, this post is just about having fun out in the ABQ sunshine.

For starters you might be wondering why Valentino came with me rather than Tristen. Well, it’s true that Tristen is the law student whereas Valentino is the forestry student. However, we have a bit of a “[D]Rad Rotation” that happens when I go on adventures. This time it was Valentino’s turn to go on a bit of an adventure, as the last time I’d done something with Valentino was my trip to Washington D.C. So when the time came to fly out to New Mexico Valentino quickly wedged himself down into my backpack, which is one of his most favorite things about traveling.

As far as flying goes things went pretty smoothly on the way out to New Mexico (at least for me, Meem had some delays). One nice thing about the trip was that we had booked a hotel right next to where I’d be taking the bar exam.They were even doing some filming right next to the hotel for a forthcoming TV show called “The Brave” – or I guess it isn’t forthcoming anymore. Despite it literally being in the middle of a public forum they told me I wasn’t supposed to take pictures, but fuck you I’m a bus.

The bad news is that the hotel was going through some substantial renovations, though it didn’t end up being that big of a deal in the end. I did find the state of the elevators to be quite funny though. The part of my brain that had engulfed itself with negligence claims and torts had a heyday with the elevators.

You might be wondering why Meem came. Meem wasn’t taking the bar exam, she just came because she plubs me. I invited her, and it just so happened that she needed to go to California for work anyways, so it was good timing. But that is why Meem was there. Speaking of which, when Meem finally made it to our hotel she brought some donuts from Dunkin’ Donuts. Valentino was pretty happy.

In fact Valentino was the first to test out the little coffee maker in our room – a machine which got quite a few uses over the next 3 days.

After Meem had a chance to get settled we went and had dinner downstairs in the hotel restaurant since we weren’t wanting to wander too far that first evening. Just a quick trip down the death traps and we were there.

After dinner it was mostly just chilling in our room since I had to get up early and we were all tired from out travel. We did have a good view to take in though (as we marveled at how little traffic ABQ has – it’s crazy really).

After some last minute reviewing on my part we all got tucked into bed right before 10pm, which is nothing short of a miracle considering that Meem and I have been known to feed off each other’s night-owliness and talk until 4am. Valentino is a responsible bear though, so he probably helped keep us in line.

While the bar exam on the whole is a shitty magical fun experience, one nice thing was that since my hotel room was literally like 6 minutes from the bar exam room. Like, seriously, there was a tunnel from our hotel to the convention center where I took the exam (though I didn’t find it until the second day).

Of course there was a legitimately haunted door down in the tunnel that just kept opening and closing itself, over and over – for three damn days. It was made even more creepy because I never saw anyone else in that tunnel and by all accounts there should have been someone in that tunnel as it lead to a parking garage, hotel, and convention center.

Of course besides the haunted tunnel the proximity also meant that I had plenty of time to come back to the hotel room for lunch. So that’s what I did each day. Valentino was always waiting for me, and Meem usually was though sometimes she was off on her own adventures!

Normally “lunch” entailed leftovers from the night before, but that was fine as I generally wasn’t especially hungry. Sometimes I’d have coffee too since they kept it subzero in the exam room. Mostly I’d just use my brief lunch break to look out the window and decompress a bit.

Then in the evenings Meem took me out for yummy viddles and we had an AWESOME vodka drink that I can’t even remember the name of. In fact I don’t even remember if it was vodka. Meem plz halp.

At the place were had the best version of that mystery drink they had some signs in the bathroom that I really liked, especially the bits about “Life’s a bitch, some days it has puppies” and “It goes on” (as does the world).

I think it was that evening that we realized the ice machine on our floor was broken. One of the hotel employees noticed Meem trying to get ice and said he would bring us some ice. Bring ice he most assuredly did. He brought a huge bucket of ice, I think one of those fancy buckets they put champagne in. Valentino approved.

Each day was early for me (and generally Meem too) but one morning when we awoke we got quite a surprise, hot air balloons!

You might have to make it bigger to see them, but they are there! I think there were 4 or 5 in the sky that morning, so nowhere near ABQ’s massive International Balloon Fiesta, which takes place in October and has over 500 balloons each year (making it the largest such festival in the world). Still, for us simple Midwestern folk it was a good way to wake up. Meem sprang forth from bed like a spring chicken.

After the exciting morning it was back to bar exam things, and during lunch Valentino was dutifully waiting for me at my little “Good Mojo” shrine.

The items on the desk deserve a little bit of explaining. Valentino he is pretty obvious, he’s your friendly neighborhood polar bear! The paper also isn’t really anything special, it’s just some instructions for bringing your ticket to the bar exam. I just placed it on my “Good Mojo” table so I didn’t lose it. It’s the dice and pencils which have some interesting backstories. I’ll go in chronological order starting with the Dixon Ticonderoga Black™ pencil on the right. Yes, that is the type of pencil, and yes – pencils are serious. freaking. business.

Now, I didn’t even get to use my pencils on the bar exam. They don’t trust you to bring in your own pencils since you might, you know, scratch the entire 926 pages of the Restatement (Second) of Contracts on your pencil or something. However, pencils are still serious business, and that Dixon is a Gawd Damned War Hero. Its term of service goes way back to the LSAT days (yes, the test that seems impossibly bad until you realize how much worse the bar is). The Dixon has survived several deployments, and I don’t mean pansy-pushing desk work, I’m talking no-man’s-land-10,000-lives-per-yard-trench-warfare of standardized testing. If Pencils could suffer PTSD, that Dixon would have been the star of Apocalypse Now. So, despite being retired like 5 times over, the Dixon came out of retirement to lend moral support to me on the bar exam.

The pencil on the left is an OOLY Ninja Black Wood Pencil™. You’ll notice that the OOLY hasn’t been used. That’s because it’s a ninja. Whereas the Dixon is a morphine infused beach storming sword wielding bad-ass, the OOLY is the tactical assassin who marks bubbles, without even being sharpened. That’s because a true ninja kills not with their lead, but their heart.

Combined, my pencils unleash a hell onto standardized tests that would leave even Lucifer crying like the bitch he is.

Seriously, those pencils are undefeated.

Anyways, as for the dice – those are actually Valentino’s! They come from the HLS Public Interest Auction, specifically the one from my 2L year (which I guess was the last one since they don’t do it anymore for some dumb reason). Now, they weren’t really giving the dice away. This was more of a “Valentino sees dice, Valentino wants dice, dice are now Valentino’s.” Despite being small, Valentino is still a polar bear, and you don’t mess with polar bears (seriously they are huge). So Valentino took the dice. I didn’t really feel bad considering they were dice, there were tons of them, and I had paid $150,000 to be there. So the dice are more of a Valentino talisman. Whereas the pencils are my lucky objects, the Boys use the dice as their lucky objects. So Valentino was adding his lucky to my lucky for some ultimate luckiness.

The bar exam didn’t stand a chance.

Another fun thing about Valentino is that he tended to stay in the hotel during the day, even when Meem and I were both gone. Normally he is an adventurer, but I think ABQ was just a little too hot for him in July and since we were only there for a few days he didn’t feel like trying to acclimate to the weather (can’t say I blame him). So he sometimes got a bit restless when I was out, and by the time I got back for lunch he would end up in weird places.

I seriously have no idea how he got up there, or how he managed to stay up there once he was there.

Speaking of weather, we got really lucky during our ABQ Adventure. We had warm sunny days with amazing sunsets.

One night we got to watch a heck of storm roll in across the desert, which resulted in Meem and I trying to get awesome lightning shots. We failed, though Meem was ultimately much more tenacious than I was about it.

The next day was the last day of the bar exam, so Valentino and I started off with some yummy yogurt from the hotel’s cafe. It was kind of dumb, the cafe didn’t start serving anything beyond basics until like.. way after it opened, then it proceeded to close right after lunch. So breakfast often consisted of yogurt left over from the day before, but I’m not going to complain too much, it was yummy and it was cheap.

Plus, as mentioned, I normally had much more enticing leftovers to look forward to for lunch.

By the end of the three day exam period I think Valentino was ready to spend some more time with Rad and Grandma Reem.

So that evening we had another yummy dinner, and while it seemed like it was going to blow in a storm (I can’t remember if it ever did) we didn’t get rained on during our outdoor feast, and we even got to see a mini rainbow! [There’s a rainbow outside my windows as I write this too, yay! – Iceland gets tons of rainbows]

I really like eating outside, but I’m super picky about it. I don’t like cold, or heat, or humidity, or precipitation. Basically I’m a scrub. However, this was good weather (until the end, when it got windy) and good food.

There was even a family next to us where the girl had a stuffed bunny rabbit with her. Out of respect for their privacy I won’t post them here, but Valentino made a bunny friend.

The next day we got to sleep in, FINALLY! 😀

But not too much. I had a clerkship interview to get to. So I had to Suit Up® and head to the federal courthouse. I realized really quick that my Midwest/New England suit was not well suited to New Mexico summer heat. Fortunately the courthouse was like a 10 minute walk from the hotel, so I was only half dead by the time I got there. I didn’t even up getting the job though, so maybe I hallucinated the entire interview and in reality I was running screaming naked around the courthouse from a dehydrated delirium until I got tazed. Who knows.

After the interview Meem and I decided to have some fun, so we headed out to the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center which is a REALLY cool center owned by the 19 Indian Pueblos of New Mexico.

Meem and I had a delicious lunch there before checking out the really interesting museum. We then got to watch a traditional dance, which was one of the big reasons we decided to visit.

During the second dance Meem got a call, or text, or pigeon, something, from the owner of a certain Breaking Bad RV Tour Company. The message? Spots had opened up on the afternoon tour. Meem and Taco Excitement to Overdrive.

We’d originally had tickets to the afternoon tour, but due to the clerkship interview we had to cancel them. Well, then the clerkship time and location got changed anyways, but by that point the tour was sold out. So while I had made peace with not getting to follow in the footsteps of my favorite meth lord I was super ecstatic to get to go after all. So we packed up our stuff, stopped through the Cultural Center’s gift shop for some goodies (Meem got an awesome bracelet) and then headed off to the Breaking Bad tour since we didn’t have much time before it started.

The tour started right near the spot we had eaten dinner at the night before so we were at least conceptually familiar with the area. We got briefly lost but then literally ran into the owner of the tour company as he was walking out of a store and Meem was on the phone with him. Ah destiny! We were meant to be on that tour.

—SPOILER ALERT—

I’m going to take a moment to stop here and say that what follows is a brief recounting of the Breaking Bad RV Tour. If you know me, you’ll know that I LOATHE spoilers with the fury of 1000 dying suns. Legitimately, I abhor spoilers to an unnatural level. As such, I sincerely try to avoid spoiling anything as much as is humanly possible. So I want to warn you that if you haven’t watched Breaking Bad (BB) and/or Better Call Saul (BCS), first, go watch them. Second, I’m going to be as non-detailed as possible with the tour, but by its very nature there are going to be some spoilers. So I’d suggest not reading what follows if you want a 100% pristine take on BB/BCS. Again, I’ll go light on the details, but the photos in and of themselves will sort of spoil something.

Anyways, back on track.

As soon as we walked around the corner, boom, there she was – a 1986 Fleetwood Bounder recreation vehicle and motor home, with signature yellow and orange stripes. The same kind as featured on BB.

Now it’s not the RV from the show, that one is owned by Sony and is actually going to be in the Smithsonian! Yes BB is that good, fight me brah. However, this is literally the same model, so it’s as close as you can get. Plus, other BB tours take you around in a shuttle bus or something, why do that when you can use an RV which replicates the one from the show in exacting detail?

I’m talking, autismo level detail (and I know such details as an autismo myself). Heck, they even got things right that a lot of BB fans forgot about – case in point the crossbow bolt from Season 5 Episode 1.

Meem and I were he first ones to arrive. The owner had asked us to show up early since we hadn’t actually paid and he was just holding our spots on a good faith basis. That was fine, it gave us more time to explore the RV before the rest of the group showed up!

Now, when I say they really paid attention to the details on the RV, I mean that – and not just on the outside, they even recreated the interior!

Yes, there were a lot of props/memorabilia from the show that they had placed inside that obviously weren’t in the show, plus the required stuff like, you know, seats. But on the whole it was a very faithful recreation of the infamous mobile meth lab.

We took the seats that are second from the front on the left side.

Another little detail that the RV had that another tour wouldn’t have dared recreate was a lack of A/C. Yep, just like in the show. In fairness the RV was supposed to have A/C, but they were having secondary generator issues that day. So we got to cruise around ABQ in the summer heat in a 1986 RV. Truth be told, it didn’t bother me in the least. If you were super heat sensitive it probably would have sucked, but when they were moving and we had the windows open it wasn’t that bad. Plus I found the prospect of trudging around New Mexico sans A/C just like Walt and Jesse to be kind of a cool, or rather, neat – cool not so much.

After getting everyone one board we were on our way!

Joining us was none other than the pink bear from Wayfarer 515.

One thing that I really liked about the tour was not only that you got to see almost all the super famous and recognizable places from both BB and BCS, but also some lesser known locales, such as this area which was converted into a Winter-time Philadelphia for Mike to “break bad” in.

Other areas were easier to place in the context of the show, but more difficult to visually match with their in-series counterpart. For instance, I immediately recognized the junk yard, but struggled to think of which angles and areas we actually saw in the show.

Then of course there were those areas which are so iconic that it’s hard to imagine them not being part of the BB/BCS universe and instead as their real-life counterpart.

Yep, mah’ cluckin’ Los Pollos Hermanos.

Los Pollos Hermanos, or Twisters in the Matrix, former dominion of a one Gustavo Fring. We actually got to eat here as part of the tour and that was pretty bad-ass. Twisters is a burger and burrito place, and we had burritos.

In the interest of time you don’t stop at every spot on the tour, some you just drive by such as Wendy’s hotel.

As well as Jesse and Jane’s house.

Other locations you don’t stop at because the owners get pissy and don’t want you there. I guess I can see it from their perspective, but at the same time I find myself having little sympathy – especially for the BCS locations when they already knew that it was going to be a hugely popular.

However, other locations have completely capitalized on their BB/BCS fame. One such example is the car wash from BB.

They have an entire gift shop inside the car wash devoted to BB/BCS stuff. They also tell you to have an “A1 Day” which is pretty neat.

Right across from the car wash is the billboard they used for the first “Better Call Saul” advertisement you see in the series.

I have a special affinity to James McGill, for obvious reasons.

The penultimate stop on the tour was the famous White household. So famous in fact that a quick Google search will yield countless results about visits to the house which range from people raging about the owners being assholes, to throwing pizzas on the roof, to the owners being portrayed as decent people after all.

Since we were with a tour – and the tour operators (who were extras in the series!) seemed to know the homeowners – we didn’t have any issues. It was really awesome to see the actual house, though at the end of the day it’s a privately owned house, so I’m not sure it’s anything I would have went out of my way to see. However, to see in as part of a BB tour is a must, and to do it in an appropriate RV is even better. And no, we didn’t throw a pizza on the roof – that’s a serious waste of pizza.

The last stop on the trip was the Super-Meth-Lab/industrial laundry, which looked pretty damn much exactly like it did in the show, minus you know, the whole super meth lab in the basement (there is no basement).

After that we headed back towards downtown ABQ.

On the way we had a hilarious interaction with another car which requires a bit of story time.

So if you’re familiar with BB at all, you know that blue crystal meth is a huge plot element. Well, ABQ denizens being industrious as they are have created a blue rock candy which they distribute in little bags – and it looks pretty much exactly like the crystal meth in the show (so much so that the TSA has confiscated it from people). They offer these on the tour, you can either buy them or win them via trivia that takes place on the tour (I won a Heisenberg sticker!). So, basically there is this big bag full of smaller drug bags of crystal meth look-alike candy on a ghetto 1986 RV in ABQ.

I noticed as we were driving around that drivers were largely reacting positively to our presence, my guess is that they either know the owners or were glad for the commerce BB/BCS brought to the city. Either way, one car that was next to us honked and there was a little girl in the back seat who was waving at us. So our driver was waving back, but when we pulled up at a stop light he signaled to the other car to roll down their window. After they did he proceeded to throw a bunch of crystal meth bags into their car for the little girl. It was really funny, because it looked 100% legit like a drug deal, complete with the old junker car and the old junker RV. To make matters even better, some of the bags fell on the ground, so they were picking up all this crystal meth candy off the road. The little girl got a kick out of it, plus its yummy candy. Just your friendly neighborhood meth dealers getting 8 year old children addicted to crystal.

In addition to the crystal meth they also had some BB t-shirts for sale and I really wanted one, but they didn’t have any in my size. So Meem and I bought some drugs candy. In the end they ended up giving us some of the bags as well, I think because the A/C was broken and they were worried about Trip Advisor reviews. Have no fears dear tour people, it was an awesome tour even without the A/C.

I give it 11/10 – would have breakfast again.

There were a lot of places we went to that I didn’t share pictures of here just because I tend to type 5000 words about everything and I need to actually do schoolwork at some point. 🙂

There was some sort of festival going on in the square with live music, so we got to hear that while Meem enjoyed some ice cream in this plaza area.

I used the opportunity to go snag an ABQ magnet for our collection.

After that we had some dinner and then made our way back to hotel. I had to get up at freaking 3am to make my flight. Since I wasn’t sure what to expect with my crystal meth I let Valentino carry those since nobody fucks with a polar bear.

Valentino takes his guard duties quite seriously.

I ended up having plenty of time as there were all of like 5 people in the entire ABQ airport (also featured in BB, by the way). However, the TSA in all their boundless genius had 8 employees working on the Pre-Check Line which had no people in it, whereas they had one person for the entire regular line. So while there wasn’t hardly anyone there, the normal line was being processed so slowly you could have measured it in geologic time. I’m not a social person, especially not at 4:30am. But me and my fellow travelers had a lot of self-depreciating laughs at how the TSA had divided up their employees.

The trip home was pretty straightforward. I had a pretty long layover on the way back, but fortunately there were only minimal delays on top of that. Southwest freaked me out at first because their system made some sort of error and displayed a 5 minute delay as five hours for about 20 minutes. It ended up being more than 5 minutes, but nowhere near 5 hours, thank freaking god. Despite having just taken you know, the bar exam – as well as interviewed with a federal judge – I had to get home so I could pack.

Yeah, I had 1 full day between the bar exam and needing to pack to leave my apartment in Boston – no rest for the wicked I suppose. However, that is a story for next time! 🙂

So that was Meem, Valentino, and I’s ABQ Adventure. Meem had some adventures of her own (including a train up to Santa Fe) while I was getting bar exam’d, but she can make her own blog about that. 😛

I had a lot of fun with them, and it was great to be with Meem during her first NM experience! It’s no real secret that SB and I intend to make our way to New Mexico (someday) so it was fun to get to experience it with family! Having Meem and Valentino there made taking the bar exam much more bear-able. 😀

The next post will focus on what happened between the end of the ABQ Adventure and all of us leaving for Iceland, which was an (very busy) adventure in and of itself!